Tag Archives: training journal

Ah November. It’s one on my most favorite months of the year. Mostly because we’ve always got a lot going on this month and I think it’s a lot of fun!! 😁

One of the reasons November is so much fun is because it’s my birthday month!!! Hahaha I was born exactly half way into November, on the 15th back in 1991. So I turned 27 this year. Yay!🥳

Haha so my father-in-law always pick out weird/funny cards to send me for my birthday. Last year’s was a cat shooting lasers out of its eyes to light the candles on a birthday cake. Haha it’s still hanging up on my fridge actually. 😂 I thought that one was gonna be hard to beat, but this year’s was a flying kitten with rainbows and stuff. It was great.

Anyway, Luke is the best and got me a believe Training journal. I’ve wanted one of these for a while and I’m really stoked about it! It’s so neat and full of all sorts of awesome stuff! I can’t wait to start using it!! Hahaha I’m gonna wait to start filling it out until December though.

Ugh it’s so pretty!!! 😍😍😍 Plus I finally found a good use for a bunch of the stickers that have come in my monthly StrideBoxes. I’ve had a huge stack of them just collecting in my drawer, but I thought this was a good place to put them. Along with a good ol Honey Stinger sticker and a fortune cookie fortune. 😁

Luke also got me Chinese food for my birthday dinner, because that’s kind of a tradition for me. Even from when I was a little kid I always wanted Chinese food for my birthday. It was a great birthday dinner. 😊 No cake though. I’ve never been a big cake person. Hahaha when I was a kid my grandma used to make me giant batches of rice crispy treats instead of birthday cakes. I’ve also had cookie cakes, pies, cheesecake, and ice cream cakes (which is kinda weird for a November birthday 😂), instead of normal cake. I wasn’t really feeling dessert this year though, which is weird for me. But I was really into the Chinese food.

Anyway, the day after my birthday I found out about a 5k/10k turkey trot on Thanksgiving Day that gives out while pumpkin pies to all of the finishers. So of course I signed up for the 5k. 🦃🏃🏻‍♀️ I’ve never done a turkey trot until this year, and of course I’m an overachiever about it and have ended up doing two. 😂 Well, signing up for two at this point. But there’s no way I’m not gonna finish a 3.1 mile turkey trot.

Anyway, while signing up I also bought a sweet turkey hat, to go along with my spiffy turkey trot Zensah compression socks, and Gobbler Grind hoodie. So I’m gonna be all turkey’d out for this race! Well, my hoodie doesn’t have a turkey on it, it just says “Gobbler Grind Marathon, Half Marathon, 10k, and 5k”. But I think it still counts. 🦃😊

Not the best photo, but you get the point. 😉

So yeah, I’m super duper excited about that! I’ve never done a turkey trot on Thanksgiving Day before because Luke and I usually travel to either Colorado or Illinois to be apart of one of our families Thanksgiving’s. But both of our dads work on Thanksgiving this year, so we decided to save some money and just stay home and do our own Thanksgiving.

We might end up doing something with my brother-in-law, his girlfriend, and her kids. But they always want us to come to their apartment and Luke and I aren’t to keen on that idea. We’re both crazy excited to be out of our apartment (for going on 4 years now 😁) and we enjoy having more space that’s all our own. Plus they vape inside their apartment and I just can’t handle that. Those things destroy my lungs… And we have a backyard their dogs could run around in, but whatever. If they don’t want to come to our house we’ll probably just stay home and do our own thing.

Okey dokey, enough about Thanksgiving for now. I ran today!!! Hahaha I was very resigned to take at least a week off from running after my races last weekend and I mean, I kinda made it. 😂 But oh man, my life is an absolute wreck when I don’t have running and the routine that it keeps me in. So I HAD to run today.

I only did 1 super easy mile, but apparently that was enough to get me back on track. Ever since I started my little break I’ve been eating like shit and sitting around being an absolute lazy and unproductive lump of a human being. Now, I’m a firm believer that sometimes doing things like that is necessary. But at this point I feel like I’ve gotten a bit out of hand with it. 😂 But like I said, my super short run this morning helped. 😄

It’s pretty crazy how tired, lazy, and out of it NOT running can make a person feel! I know a break is necessary, but yesterday I felt like shit. That’s when I decided that I absolutely NEEDED to run. Even if it was only a super short 1 mile run. 😊

Whew! Anyway, more photos from the Gobbler Grind Half were posted online last night. Of course I appreciate free race photos, but I’m really disappointed about how terrible the quality of all of the photos are. legit could have taken better pictures with my phone. In fact, my dad and I DID take better photos with our phones.They had legit photographs with DSLR cameras, so I’m not sure what happened here…

I mean, they aren’t awful. But I still feel like I could have handed someone my phone and ended up with a much better quality photo. oh well. At least they’re free!

But let’s just compare them to this photo taken at Longview. I cropped this one A LOT and it’s still a much better quality. Plus photos from Longview were free as well.

I totally almost forgot today was the last day of June! And it’s not like June has felt like it flew by or anything, I legit just forgot haha. But anyway, we’re half way through the year and I’m still going pretty strong with all of my goals! Haha well, at the very least I’m still thinking about and working on them, so that’s pretty impressive! I don’t think I’ve ever actually continued with goals I set for myself at the begging of the year for this long, so that’s just an impressive feat in and of itself! Now, only 6 more months to go! 😉

So this last week of June has been crazy hot. I don’t think we’ve had one day this week were the heat index didn’t go over 100 degrees. It’s been kinda rough. My poor garden is really suffering. The plants just aren’t getting any break from the intense heat and sun. That’s another problem, it’s been hot, humid, and sunny with little to no cloud cover. Hopefully we’ll get a break from the intense heat soon! I’m not sure how much more my plants can take. And if the rest of this summer is gonna be like this, then well, gross…

But despite the awful weather we’ve been having, my running hasn’t actually suffered much! Haha probably thanks to my spiffy new treadmill!!! When it’s just too hot out I’ve been able to hope on the treadmill and do my runs instead of either having to cut them short or just not do them at all. I even managed to run 6.23 more miles than I did last month when the weather was a little better. Go me!!

I’ve also been hardcore kicking ass at getting my step goal done this month! I only had 8 day’s this month were I didn’t hit it and only 2 of those days were consecutive. Haha you can see that it’s usually Sunday that I don’t make my goal, but that’s because that’s usually my rest day and I don’t typically go for it. I mean, I need at least one day of complete rest a week. 😉

Last month I wasn’t doing a very good job of keeping up with my training journal and that kinda carried over for the first half of this month. Oops. But for the last 2 weeks I’ve been pretty darn meticulous about it. I’ve also been trying to be much more detailed with it. Since I start training for my two halves in two days in November next month I want to be in the habit of keeping a much more detailed training log. I feel like that will come in very handy for this upcoming training cycle, so it’s just something I want to stay on top of.

Even though it’s been intensely hot and I haven’t been enjoying it at all, I’ve still had a pretty good month! In a couple of weeks Luke and I are going to be going on vacation with a bunch of his family, so I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to keep up with this trend of running more monthly miles. I’d like to and I’m going to try, but I’m not sure how this vacation is going to go (hopefully it’s nothing like our Florida vacation from last year), so I guess we shall see?

How was your month? Have you been keeping up with your goals? I sure hope so!!